Alignment- and reference-free phylogenomics with colored de-Bruijn graphs

Abstract

We present a new whole-genome based approach to infer large-scale phylogenies that is alignment- and reference-free. In contrast to other methods, it does not rely on pairwise comparisons to determine distances to infer edges in a tree. Instead, a colored de-Bruijn graph is constructed, and information on common subsequences is extracted to infer phylogenetic splits. Application to different datasets confirms robustness of the approach. A comparison to other state-of-the-art whole-genome based methods indicates comparable or higher accuracy and efficiency.